The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In object-oriented computer program development, Rich Internet Application (RIA) architectures have recently become popular. An example of an RIA framework is Dojo, which is described at the Internet site dojotoolkit.org. In a Dojo based RIA architecture, RESTful web services act as the transport mechanism while JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) objects act as the data transfer object. “RESTful web services” refers to a web service implemented using HTTP and the principles of representational state transfer (REST), which is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems. JSON objects are described at the Internet site json.org.
JSON objects may be used to communicate object data from a JSON compatible server to clients such as those implemented using Dojo's RIA function libraries. However, Dojo also imposes other requirements on JSON objects to make them consumable directly by Dojo widgets. For example, Dojo widgets may require a JSON Object to contain a header instructing the widget how to map key pieces of its internal data to JSON attributes. Additionally, Dojo may expect the name of the first collection object in the JSON object to be named “items” and the names of any collection objects further down the hierarchy of the JSON object to be named “children.” Hence, generic JSON objects that do not meet these additional requirements cannot be consumed by Dojo widgets.